Today, Steve and I assembled and uploaded two new videos to Vimeo, bringing the total to 581. It is a few days over two years since we last added videos. One video is of two white-faced herons preening on the roof of a house which has since been transported over the border to New South Wales. They were filmed in 2000, but I only realised that there was no video of them last year, and the video was not assembled and uploaded until today. The other is of one of the most commonly planted ornamental eucalypts which attracted plenty of ants and native and European honeybees, which I filmed nearly four years ago.

During my cousin Sue’s visit to the mountain, I mentioned the size of poinsettias here compared with those in the UK where she comes from. There, poinsettias are a favourite Christmas pot plant, whereas here, they are shrubs and trees. Today, I determined to tour the mountain in search of flowering poinsettias to make my point. I drove from east to west and north to south on the plateau but did not add to the two plants close to home which I photographed at the beginning of my quest. One was a shrub, perhaps 2.5 metre tall, and the other, a 4-5 m tall tree, its branches cascading over a garden fence. Poinsettias are endemic from Mexico to southern Guatemala. What look like flowers are in fact bracts, most often red, grouped around the flower in the centre, but they can also be cream, pink, apricot, pale green or white.

What is remarkable about the photos I took this morning is that the flowers on the ivory curl or buckinghamia tree in front of the letterboxes of my unit block, were out in Winter, in June 2025, whereas flowering normally takes place in late Summer and early Autumn. The tree was planted more than thirty years ago and has been at its present size for a long time. It is endemic to the tropical rainforest of north-eastern Queensland, at altitudes from 200 to 1,000 m, where It can grow to thirty metres tall, although the tree outside my front door is about fifteen metres high. Part of the tree was broken off by cyclonic weather in 2023 and earlier this year. It flowers abundantly in due season, exuding a sweet, heady aroma. The ivory curl tree has become a popular planting in parks, streets and private gardens in regions far beyond its natural range. It grows well even as far south as Sydney and Melbourne, but only reaches some seven to eight metres tall.

As remarkable as the Winter flowering is the fact that I have not videoed or photographed the tree until now, so that the only… Read Complete Text

This morning I photographed some funnel ant mounds, intrigued by their existence in gaps in the footpath in Driscoll Lane. Such mounds are a typical and frequent sight on lawns and road verges on the mountain after sufficient rain. But these  were in the tiniest of gaps, where a concrete footpath joined a concrete curb beneath the picket fence. The ants had pushed the earth through the gaps, which begs the question of why they did so in a location covered by a hard surface, and the size of any prey which might fall down the funnel. Biodiversity will not be denied, I have seen plants pushing through just such a gap between hard surfaces, morels pushing through a gravel drive and in Holland, hollyhocks surging to their full height in the gap between the edge of the pavement and the front of a house.